The popularity of the Internet has exploded in the past few years. Each day more and more people are signing on to the Internet. This rapid expansion has resulted in the formation of a vast pool of publicly available information on a wide variety of topics. The information is not only in pictures and text, but may also be in audio or video formats. The problem is that as the amount of information increases, the more time is required to download the information from the Internet. The information increase can be because either there is more information or the information format compels larger data amounts. The time increase can also be a problem for the Internet Service Provider (ISP), as users will remain logged on for longer periods of time to download large files, thus causing the ISPs to have gridlock.
Presently, the dominant use of the Internet is as a reference tool where the Internet is being used to locate and provide some kind of information. Typically, users employ a search service or engine like Yahoo or Alta Vista or some other engine on the World Wide Web to search the Internet for relevant information. Accordingly, once relevant information is located, a request is made by the user's PC to the ISP to retrieve or download the information.
Typically, the size of the information received is much larger in terms of bytes than the information request that is delivered. The request could be basically a few commands comprising the location of the information. The information that is downloaded is typically in HTML format, which may have bit mapped images, JPEG files, MPEG files, audio clips, and the like. The procedure for downloading usually takes a long time, especially if the user is constrained to a 28.8 kilo-bits per second (Kbps) or 33.6 Kbps, or even to a 56 Kbps baud modem.
More specifically, the size of the request would be perhaps 1,000 bytes, while the requested information could be several megabytes. As a result, there is a need in the technology for a method and apparatus to receive data that is much larger than the size of the request. The ratio of receive to request may be a 1,000 to 1, depending on the information. For example, text information may have a ratio of 10 to 1 or 100 to 1, however, video clips with sound may yield a ratio of a 1000 to 1 or higher.
An existing solution that is available in the prior art is to utilize a satellite return path to the computer to provide the requested data to the user. Thus, the user sends out a request over a telephone system, and receives the data over a satellite downlink. However, this solution is expensive as it requires the purchase and installation of a satellite downlink station. Moreover, there is a limited ability to install such systems, particularly in urban environments with space limitations, and other areas with covenants preventing the installation of satellite antennas. Furthermore, the data rate achieved by this system is only about 400 Kbps which is not significantly higher than current ISDN line data rates of 128 Kbps per second.
Another existing solution is to use a broadcast television or a cable station to transmit digital data through existing television signals. This has been developed by a company called EN Technology. It appears that they are providing a limited television link that broadcasts the data to a community of users, such that while viewing data enhanced programming on TV, the user can receive digital data as well as the television signal. However, this solution lacks selectivity or interactivity, as the user can only receive whatever data the broadcaster is sending. In other words, the user cannot select the data that will be sent by broadcaster.
Therefore, there is a need in the prior art for an inexpensive solution that uses the existing broadcasting infrastructure to send data to PCs which would accelerate the downloading process, particularly where the data received is significantly larger than the size of the request, typical of the needs encountered by the Internet user.